The Case of the Love Commandos

by Tarquin Hall

  “All that is required is for you to locate the said individual and make a note of where exactly he’s seated,” said Puri after explaining what had happened.

  “Yes, I suppose I can do that,” said Rumpi, although she couldn’t have sounded less confident or enthusiastic.

  “Tip-top. Once you reach Jammu, Inspector Malhotra will do the needful. Your help could be required in pointing out the guilty party, that is all.”

  “What if he’s dangerous, Chubby?”

  “Not to worry, my dear—a common chain snatcher, only.”

  She thought it over for a moment and then sighed. “I just don’t understand why you can’t ask Mummy.”

  The question provoked a predictable diatribe about how mummies aren’t detectives. She held the phone away from her ear for a moment or two and then said, “OK, Chubby, have it your way. I’ll do my best. What was in your wallet, by the way?”

  Puri ran through the contents in his head: a couple of bank cards, a few thousand rupees in cash, various counterfeit IDs, multiple fake business cards and two SIM cards for untraceable mobile numbers.

  “This and that,” he answered.

  Even if Rumpi had wanted to—and she didn’t—it would have been impossible to keep the theft of Chubby’s wallet from coming to her mother-in-law’s notice. Mummy-ji had radar like a bat and their berths were all of three feet apart.

  Besides, Rumpi didn’t like all this cloak-and-dagger sneaking around. She was a housewife, content to attend to her home and family, volunteer two days a week with a charity helping street children, and make her mango achaar, which was generally regarded as being in a class of its own.

  If Puri wanted his wallet back, he’d just have to put up with Mummy getting involved. She was the most capable person by far. Only recently, she’d managed to entrap a con man posing as an electrical meter reader by letting him into her Punjabi Bagh home, showing him the cupboard under the stairs and then locking him inside.

  The said con man had robbed numerous elderly citizens prior to meeting his match in the form of this diminutive, gray-haired lady and Mummy had been heralded as a local hero. There was even talk of an award.

  Why Chubby would never acknowledge her obvious talents and allow her to put them to use in an open and free manner was beyond Rumpi. He loved and respected his mother, of that there was no doubt, but when it came to work, he was intensely possessive. Or was it competitive? Either way, he behaved totally irrationally whenever he got wind of his mother “playing” detective and Rumpi could never make him see sense.

  “Just I knew something was going on!” exclaimed Mummy five minutes later as they stood conferring in the section of the train between the carriages. “Chubby said earlier, na, some life-and-death situation is there.”

  “I hate to disappoint you, but it’s not all that serious,” said Rumpi, who went on to explain about the wallet and the fat pickpocket.

  Mummy responded with a dismissive tut. “Probably left it at home,” she said. “So forgetful men are.”

  “Chubby’s usually careful with his things. If he says it was taken, then it probably was.”

  “He’s certain it was this concerned individual?”

  “That’s what he said. And he’s not one to point fingers, either.”

  “That is true also.”

  Encouraged, Rumpi repeated Chubby’s description of the pickpocket.

  “Achcha,” said Mummy once she had taken it all in. “This thing is obvious. After identification we’ll alert the train inspector. He can do personal searching of his possessions.”

  “No, no, that’s not what Chubby asked me—sorry, I mean us—to do.” Rumpi made a face, immediately regretting her faux pas, which she could see had not been lost on her mother-in-law.

  Mummy crossed her arms in front of her chest and made a face of her own. “Let me guess. Chubby said to keep me in the dark—Mummies are not detectives and all,” she said.

  “You know what he’s like.”

  “Exactly. So why I should do assistance, you tell me?”

  “Because I need your help. I’m useless at this kind of thing.”

  Mummy sulked for a moment or two longer before saying, “Fine. But the proper and right way is to alert the inspector. Robbery was done on the train, na?”

  “But Chubby said he’s going to have the police waiting in Jammu.”

  The doors to the adjacent carriage to theirs opened and a shifty-looking male passenger with a large stomach emerged. He eyed the two women with what appeared to be suspicion and stepped into the toilet.

  Mummy gave Rumpi a knowing look. “Could be that one.”

  “Except Chubby said he was wearing a suit.”

  Mummy went thoughtfully quiet for a moment and then suggested a plan. “Here’s what to do: just I’ll take one photo to send to Chubby via my portable.”

  “Your portable?”

  “Naturally. It is having eight megapixels.”

  “But then Chubby will know you’re involved, Mummy, and I’ll be the one who has to put up with all his cribbing.”

  “Fine. I’ll take photos and do Bluetooth to your phone. Then you can do forwarding.”

  “How are you going to take a picture without him noticing?” Rumpi asked.

  “Never forget I am old,” she said.

  “What does that mean, Mummy-ji?”

  “Didn’t you know? Old is gold, na.”

  • • •

  Puri had hung his trousers to dry, changed into his pajamas, called his bank to cancel his debit and credit cards, and was now lying on his bunk (still wearing his cap, which he never took off in public), staring up at the ceiling and feeling in something of a funk.

  All did not seem right with the universe. First, he’d failed to solve the Jain Jewelry Heist case. And now he—Vish Puri, best detective in all India—had been pickpocketed.

  He glanced over at his fellow passenger on the opposite bunk. He could tell that the young man was Bengali (his “Z”s came out as “J”s), he worked for a call center or a BPO (his headset had left a distinctive red mark on his temple) and it was highly likely that he was allergic to dairy (the white spots on his fingernails indicated severe calcium deficiency). So why couldn’t he figure out what the gang had done with the loot? And how could he have been so easily duped by a common pickpocket?

  There was surely only one answer: “nazar lag gayi”—the evil eye was upon him. No doubt this had come about because of his success, which had fostered envy. The evil eye was known to fix itself on those who enjoyed well-being and happiness yet failed to disguise their good fortune. Bad luck would now plague him unless he could shake the gaze free. To do this, he would need to make an offering to Shiva, the destroyer of evil.

  Crucially, Puri would also need to play down his accomplishments from now on. He’d start by telling Elizabeth Rani to put away his framed India Today cover and all his awards. Just as a mother blemishes an infant’s features with kohl to disguise its beauty, he would have to strive to appear flawed, no matter how hard this might prove.

  Just then his phone vibrated—an SMS from Rumpi with a photo attached.

  Part of the image was obscured by a curtain. The rest showed a fat man in an undershirt lying on a bunk asleep.

  It wasn’t the pickpocket: his moustache was Hitler-like.

  Puri sent back an appreciative message saying that this wasn’t the man.

  He got a reply from Rumpi assuring him that she had another candidate in her sights.

  In her carriage alone, Mummy found a number of men with large bellies. Two matched Puri’s description, and she managed to snap pictures of them both. The first was asleep, which made the task easy; the second she caught unawares while he was brushing his teeth and clearing his nasal passages at the communal faucet outside the toilet.

  Neither of them was the pickpocket, however, and so Mummy moved on to the next carriage. It was identical to the one in which she was traveling: six berths per section, each sep
arated by flimsy curtains. In those sections where the lights were still on, Mummy was able to get a good look at all the occupants without having to intrude upon their privacy. But where necessary, she didn’t shy from intruding. And although she provoked some cold or inquisitive stares, no one raised any objection, privacy being something of a tenuous concept in anything other than first class.

  Methodically and with a certain natural discretion, she passed through five more carriages, doubling back where necessary, and loitering here and there to make sure that every passenger was accounted for. She came across four more males with ample bellies, many of them already snoring loudly, but only one with a moustache.

  Finally Mummy came to the first-class carriage, which boasted six self-contained compartments with sliding doors. Lights burned inside four of them and she began to knock on each door in turn. To whomsoever answered, she explained, somewhat absentmindedly, that she was looking for her berth and then apologized when told that she was in the wrong carriage altogether.

  A knock on the fourth compartment, however, engendered a hostile response. “What do you want?” a woman’s voice screeched.

  “Apologies, I’m looking for my berth,” called out Mummy, to which the response was “Are you blind and stupid? Check your ticket!”

  Mummy couldn’t believe her ears. “That is not the proper way, na!” she said.

  But the woman upbraided her again, bawling, “Oh, just get lost, you pain!”

  Deciding that she must be some kind of demon, and remembering the old axiom that the only answer to a fool is silence, Mummy moved on to the fifth compartment. Through a gap in the curtains hanging in the window, she could see the interior. Two men were sitting opposite each other studying what appeared to be a diagram. One of them was short and thin with a pinched, weasel face. The other, who had his back to Mummy, was a man of large proportions. He was wearing a suit. Mummy also spied the curl of a moustache.

  Fat Man was doing the talking and kept pointing at the diagram and running his finger along a portion of it. At one point, he made a movement with one hand as if he was giving something a hard push. Then he folded up the map and pulled out a thick envelope from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. This he handed to Weasel Face, who promptly opened it, running his fingertips over a thick wad of thousand-rupee notes. The two then stood up and shook hands.

  Mummy retreated into the shadows halfway down the corridor, where she stopped and turned, mobile phone at the ready.

  When Fat Man emerged from the compartment, she got two quick snaps of him without being noticed. She then watched as he knocked three times on the compartment occupied by the demon woman.

  “Where’ve you been?” she demanded as the door slid open.

  “Taking care of business,” he answered.

  “I’m hungry. Where the hell’s my dinner?”

  “Patience, patience, my rose. I’ll serve you momentarily.”

  Fat Man was about to step inside the compartment when a voice called out, “Mummy-ji! There you are. What are you doing up here? We’ve been worried.”

  It was Chetan.

  Mummy motioned for him to keep quiet.

  “Why? What’s going on? Why are you taking pictures?”

  Chetan had got Fat Man’s attention. He started down the corridor toward them, his forehead crumpled into a quizzical frown.

  “Go! Phat-a-phat!” she told her nephew, and gave him a push.

  They hurried back through the train, only stopping once they’d reached their berths.

  Mummy turned off all the lights and told Chetan to get under his sheet and keep quiet.

  After fifteen minutes, when she was sure they hadn’t been followed, she checked her phone. The pictures weren’t the best quality but good enough.

  Within a couple of minutes they’d been forwarded to Rumpi’s phone and then on to Chubby.

  His reply read, “Bingo!”

  Four

  Puri arrived at Lucknow’s magnificent Charbagh railway station at five thirty in the morning, groggy after half a night’s sleep in the air-conditioning. He’d been tormented by a recurring nightmare in which his humiliation at the hands of the pickpocket had been exposed on national TV. While facing the glare of the cameras, he’d looked down to find that he was naked apart from a nappy. Mummy had then appeared, telling the press that her son needed his daily dose of iron tonic. “Bed rest is required for tension purposes,” she’d informed the hacks as the detective had started howling like a toddler.

  He was still trying to shake off the sensation that the dream didn’t belong entirely in the realm of the subconscious when he found Facecream in the station car park. Their mutual choice of greeting was a formal handshake rather than a namaste or the side-on hug commonly observed between Indian men and women. It denoted a certain professionalism and mutual respect.

  “You’ve heard anything from the boy?” asked Puri as they both squeezed into the back of the hatchback she’d hired.

  “No word, sir. No trace.”

  Facecream had traveled from Agra through the night and slept no more than a couple of hours. Her complexion, which was usually aglow, had lost its luster. The worry showed in the creases around her eyes and the way in which she ground her molars together. And yet her natural dynamism hadn’t waned.

  “One thing you should know, sir: Vishnu Mishra left Agra on the highway headed this way at midnight,” she said.

  “He will go directly to Ram’s village,” reasoned Puri. “His daughter has absconded—and if, as you say, he is not in possession of the boy, he will take someone hostage.”

  “Ram’s parents?”

  “Definitely.”

  Facecream looked skeptical. “But if anything happens to them, he’ll be the prime accused. Ram registered a complaint against Mishra after he threatened to kill him. Also, Tulsi called him again and told him not to touch Ram’s family, not if he ever wants to see her again,” she said.

  “Think a Thakur type will worry about such details? Believe me, he will stop at nothing to get his daughter back. It takes a father to know.”

  They passed along dark empty streets where stray dogs roamed and litter lay awaiting the reed brooms of sweepers. It had been three or four years since Puri had last been in Lucknow, once celebrated as the Constantinople of the East. In the dim, expiring light, he could see that the crush of contemporary India was slowly taking its architectural toll on the city. Malls and office blocks, about as imaginatively designed as cardboard boxes, now cluttered the place. Building sites appeared around every corner, with concrete superstructures cloaked in bamboo scaffolding.

  Vestiges of this once-great center of culture and learning remained, however, in the domes and towers of palaces and mosques etched against the somber sky. The British influence remained conspicuous, too. They passed a church with a spire that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Cotswolds village, and the old Residency building—scene of some of the bloodiest fighting during the 1857 First War of Independence (“the Mutiny” to the Britishers)—its brickwork still pockmarked by cannon fire.

  The driver turned on his radio. When the newsreader spoke of the burning of Korans in Afghanistan and subsequent rioting in Kabul, Puri noted similarities between that conflict and the one of 1857. The ramifications of colonialism always proved disastrous. Indeed, Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s most lawless states, was yet to recover from the legacy of the Britishers in the detective’s opinion. The British Empire had destroyed the fabric of the indigenous economy as well as the old nawab culture, which, for all its faults, had produced an educated intelligentsia. Since independence, the vacuum had been filled by something far less sophisticated. Uttar Pradesh’s modern rulers possessed none of the intellectual acumen of the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru or Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the Dalit leader responsible for writing the Indian constitution. Today’s politicians were crude men and women guilty of everything from smuggling to rape and murder. Their route to power was not com
petence or judiciousness but exploiting caste vote banks.

  The latest leader to ascend to the state’s highest elected office was the son of a hereditary laundry man. Thanks to the affirmative-action “reservation” system for so-called backward classes, the new chief minister had been the first in his family to receive an education. Popularly known as Baba Dhobi, this former bureaucrat had tapped into the resentment of the long-oppressed untouchable castes to win power.

  “We will thrash the Brahmins with our chappals!” had been his main slogan.

  Since becoming chief minister four years ago, Baba Dhobi had sought to consolidate his cult standing by using state funds to build lavish monuments and statues to the leaders of the Dalit movement, himself included. Bronze effigies of this stocky, thick-nosed character—unmistakable in his simple dhoti with the unshorn tufts of hair growing from his ears—now stood at major intersections across the state. With new elections looming in a couple of months, his smiling image also stared out from myriad billboards and posters across Lucknow.

  But from what Puri had read in the newspapers, Baba Dhobi was languishing in the polls. The crucial Muslim vote looked set to abandon him, and there were even grumblings amongst his Dalit base, who claimed that their lives had improved only marginally during his tenure. It was the detective’s understanding also that crime was still on the rise. Often referred to as India’s badlands, Uttar Pradesh was deeply feudal, with a caste landscape that was bewilderingly complex. Mafia-like networks controlled every aspect of the economy, and dacoits indulged in kidnapping, smuggling and carjacking.

  Puri was glad to have his pistol with him. But before heading into deepest, darkest rural Uttar Pradesh, he needed to perform a puja to help ward off the evil eye. He explained to the driver his requirement and soon the ornate shikhara of a temple, its shrine strung with colored lights, came into view.

  “Fifteen minutes is required, only,” Puri told Facecream as the car stopped.

  He got out and then remembered that he didn’t have a paisa on him. Unable to tell even Facecream about his embarrassing secret, he made some excuse about his ATM card not working and asked to borrow three thousand rupees. With a small portion of this money, he bought from a stand in front of the temple some ghee, a coconut, and a garland of marigolds. He found a dozen other worshippers crowded before an effigy of Shiva, intoning “Om Nimah Shivayah.” Puri explained his evil eye issue to the priest, who suggested an appropriate puja. He then chanted some shlokas from the Hindu holy texts and made an offering of ghee to the deity. The marigolds were draped around the idol’s neck and the coconut duly blessed.